Ford Motor Co., beset by higher recall costs and bad weather, earned first-quarter net income of $989 million, down 39 percent from a year ago and less than analysts’ estimates. The shares fell.

Ford earned 25 cents a share excluding certain items, trailing the 31-cent average estimate for the first time since 2011. The company attributed the miss to an extra $400 million in warranty and recall expenses, a bigger loss in South America and bad weather in North America. Recall costs are rising across 2008 to 2013 vehicles, not from one specific model, said chief financial officer Bob Shanks.

“We have seen more field-service actions over the last two years,” Shanks told reporters today at Ford headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. Recalls have been increasing because “there’s more complexity in the vehicles, more technology in the vehicles. There’s better data and a better ability to very quickly identify issues. Everybody is generally reacting ― certainly we do ― as soon as we find a problem.”

General Motors Co., under scrutiny for its slow recall of 2.59 million small cars linked to 13 deaths, took a $1.3 billion charge for recall-related costs as it reported an 82 percent decline in first-quarter profit yesterday. Ford slid 3.3 percent to $15.78 at the close in New York for the biggest one-day drop in three months. The shares have gained 2.3 percent this year after rising 19 percent last year.

Automakers in the U.S. had recalled 14.7 million vehicles through 159 campaigns this year through yesterday. For all of last year, there were 632 recalls covering almost 22 million vehicles. About a third of all recalled cars and trucks don’t get repaired, and about 1 out of every 7 vehicles, or 36 million, still on the road have an unrepaired defect, according to data compiled by regulators, safety advocates and the CarFax vehicle history company.

Ford ranked fifth among automakers last year when it conducted 16 recalls in the U.S. covering 1.19 million vehicles and it ranked fourth in 2012 when it issued 24 recalls for 1.4 million vehicles, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration annual reports. This year through yesterday, Ford had conducted three U.S. recalls covering 420,018 vehicles, according to NHTSA data on its Website.

During the first quarter, Ford’s South America unit lost $510 million before taxes, compared with a loss of $218 million a year earlier, according to a statement. It recognized $310 million in costs to reflect the decline in Venezuelan currency. Ford said it will now lose more money in South America this year than the $34 million it lost last year, which is a change from its previous guidance. The region may break even for the rest of the year, Shanks said.

The company’s pretax operating profit fell 36 percent to $1.38 billion. A higher warranty reserve, weather-related expenses and currency effects reduced profit by about $900 million, Ford said. The coincidence of these items is unusual and not representative of the business, Ford said.

“We expect the rest of the quarters to be substantially stronger than what we’re seeing in the first quarter,” Shanks told analysts on a conference call today. “The run rate of the business is much healthier than what the initial view of the bottom line would seem.”

The second-largest U.S. automaker is rolling out 23 new models worldwide this year and a record 16 in North America. That has required costly overhauls of factories, including 13 weeks of downtime at two U.S. plants that produce profitable F-150 pickups. The automaker has promised investors that the profit declines from this “building-block year” will result in better 2015 earnings.

“We’re a little surprised at the magnitude of the hit in 2014 from all the product transitions going on, but when you look out at 2015, they’re very well positioned,” said Michael Levine, a fund manager at Oppenheimer Funds Inc. in New York, who said Ford is one of the top 10 stocks in the $5.8 billion equity income fund he manages. “We’re very excited about the future, but clearly the next few quarters could be messy.”

The profit dip comes as Ford prepares for a transition at the top, with Chief Operating Officer Mark Fields, 53, set to replace Alan Mulally, 68, as chief executive officer, according to two people familiar with the company’s plans. Ford could reveal the timing of Fields’s promotion and Mulally’s departure as soon as May 1, said the people, who asked not to be identified disclosing internal discussions.

In the first quarter, Ford had pretax operating income in North America of $1.5 billion, down from $2.4 billion last year. Ford’s U.S. sales fell 2.8 percent to 580,260 vehicles in the first quarter, while its market share fell to 15.5 percent from 16.2 percent a year earlier, according to researcher Autodata Corp. of Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey. (Bloomberg)